‘Serial’ Podcast Catches Fire

In the sleepy world of podcasts, ‘Serial’ has emerged as a global phenomenon

Sarah Koenig and producer Dana Chivvis in the studio. Elise Bergerson

By

Ellen Gamerman

Nov. 13, 2014 6:37 p.m. ET

A 15-year-old murder case is now riveting the nation.

The attention doesn’t come courtesy of a new TV series or movie, or anything involving a screen, for that matter, but a free podcast called “Serial,” a nonfiction story from the producers of “This American Life” that unspools week by week over the earphones of an unusually broad and fervent audience.

The show, which reopens the investigation into the 1999 strangling death of a Baltimore high-school student and her former 17-year-old boyfriend now serving a life sentence for the crime, has sparked a following straight out of the golden age of radio. It also has managed a rare trick in a noisy news and entertainment landscape driven by a lights-camera-action mind-set: It gets people to drop everything and just listen. New episodes are made available every Thursday at 6 a.m. Eastern time. This week, hundreds of thousands of listeners eagerly tuned in to hear episode 8 out of a likely 12.

Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the murder. Courtesy of Serial

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In the normally low-profile world of podcasting, “Serial” is a certified sensation—a testament to the power of great storytelling. It’s quickly become the most popular podcast in the world, according to Apple, and the fastest to reach 5 million downloads and streams in iTunes history. “Serial” is the top podcast in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, and in the top 10 in Germany, South Africa and India.

Jason Reitman, a filmmaker whose credits include “Up in the Air,” is so obsessed, he taught himself the show’s disquieting piano score while biding time between installments. “I look forward to every Thursday in a way that I don’t remember awaiting the release of an episode of anything recently,” he said. “There’s something very intimate about someone telling you a story that close to your ears.”

A bulletin board at Lakes Community High School. Emily Cody

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The episodes explore whether an honor-roll student and onetime junior-prom prince named Adnan Syed was wrongly convicted of the murder of Hae Min Lee, his popular former girlfriend at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County. The show’s co-creator and narrator, Sarah Koenig, spent a year examining the holes in the case against Mr. Syed. The suspense is as much driven by the story as it is by Ms. Koenig’s shifting convictions over Mr. Syed’s guilt or innocence.

“Serial” is downloaded an average 1.26 million times per episode, sending fans into debates over the finer points of the evidence. People can hear the podcast, which is like a radio show but entirely on the Internet, either by streaming it from the “Serial” website or downloading it onto a phone, tablet or computer from a platform like iTunes.

The show has seized the popular imagination and developed an unusually intense following. High-school English teachers have abandoned their normal lesson plans and are having their classes follow along. Visitors to the social-media and entertainment website Reddit are attempting to investigate the crime on their own, sorting through court documents, retracing the footsteps of the suspects, sometimes even trying to track down key players who testified in court. People are listening to a podcast about the podcast—there’s one by Slate—while switching allegiances over the true identity of the killer.

It’s struck a powerful chord with people in the entertainment industry, who have been busy promoting it on Twitter. “My favorite TV show is on the radio,” wrote Danny Zuker, a writer and producer known for the TV series “Modern Family.” From actor Adam Scott of “Parks and Recreation”: “@serial has taken over my life.” Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt posted a picture of a “listening party”—people sitting around an open laptop, staring into space. After “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky praised the show, someone tweeted at him: “Totally agree! Make a movie of it.”

Hollywood executives already have contacted agents for “This American Life” with ideas for TV or movie projects around “Serial” (so far the show is not pursuing any). The success story could spur the entertainment industry to take a closer look at podcasts as a source of material. “Hollywood tends to chase what’s popular, and ‘Serial’ certainly is,” said Beau Willimon, creator of “House of Cards,” who wrote a 4,000-plus word, two-part meditation on the show on Reddit. “It’s a vast and ripe medium.” (He insisted on total silence about the latest episode because he was busy filming “House of Cards” on Thursday morning and hadn’t yet heard it.)

The staff hopes to continue with a second season, also called “Serial.” The timing and subject of that story haven’t been determined, though “Serial” executive producer Julie Snyder said the next season probably wouldn’t focus on a crime. The program is largely funded by “This American Life,” with a main sponsor, the email-marketing service MailChimp. Ms. Snyder said the staff is still figuring out how to pay for next season, but the podcast would likely remain free.

“This American Life,” a program funded largely by listener donations, corporate sponsorships and fees paid by radio stations, is a production of Chicago Public Media/WBEZ Chicago, a nonprofit entity and the public-radio station in Chicago. “This American Life” devoted a revenue surplus from last year to help pay for “Serial.” The show was launched on a shoestring, with a small staff, some of whom pull double duty on “This American Life.”

Legal experts are riveted by “Serial.” Deirdre Enright, director of investigation at the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law, assigned a team of students to delve into the case. Since the podcast, Ms. Enright said that she has received hundreds of emails and “some very good tips on alternate suspects.” Used to working in relative obscurity, she called the attention “unexpected and overwhelming and startling.”

There is no indication whether a new trial will be opened. The state’s attorney’s office for Baltimore city declined to comment on the case.

The story has spurred on amateur crime solvers, including many who have flocked to Reddit. So far this month, more than 171,000 people have visited the site’s “Serial” area. People claiming to know Mr. Syed put up posts that have disparaged or defended him; strangers speculate about whether he could be a sociopath. Personal information about people whose full identities have been kept private in the story have emerged here, too, at least briefly. The site ran into trouble after the Boston Marathon bombing, when members wrongly singled out several people as possible suspects. In the “Serial” section, moderators vow to remove material like home addresses and Facebook links and remind posters that “these are real people with real lives.”

Rabia Chaudry, the lawyer who brought the story to Ms. Koenig. Rabia Chaudry

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Mr. Syed has apparently not listened to the series in prison in Maryland—he doesn’t have access to the Internet. But he has begun receiving a lot of letters from listeners, said Rabia Chaudry, a lawyer and friend of the Syed family who first alerted Ms. Koenig to the case. Ms. Chaudry is making a note of which parts of Mr. Syed’s story have troubled listeners the most—points that a lawyer should address head on if there is another trial. “This is like research—you know what the potential jury might be thinking,” she said.

At the heart of “Serial,” and what has fans binge listening to catch up with the series, is the narrator herself, Ms. Koenig. A gifted storyteller, she seductively dishes out clues and chases down dead ends. Listeners are swept up in her obsession and feel like they are part of a hunt for truth and justice alongside an entertaining and smart companion.

Each episode starts with the plinks of piano music and the detached voice of an automated operator connecting Mr. Syed’s phone call from prison to Ms. Koenig: “This is a Global Tel*Link prepaid call from—Adnan Syed—an inmate at a Maryland correctional facility.” Ms. Koenig’s storytelling style—part goofy best friend, part hipster Encyclopedia Brown—is filled with visuals. “He has giant brown eyes, like a dairy cow,” she says of her subject.

She is transparent about her shifting feelings and quick to admit failure: “We tried this drive, twice we tried, in fact, because, full disclosure, the first time we screwed it up.” She describes herself as a “moron” at one point. She offers whimsical asides in an office scene: “That’s a scanner, scanning its little scanner heart out.” She worries about coming up empty: “That’s my fear, is I’m gonna get through all this and just be like, ‘I dunno.’”

The Leakin Park crime scene in 1999. Courtesy of Serial

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As they do with addictive TV, fans are already fretting that the last episode will be a letdown. “I feel like we’re pretty good at making sure it won’t be a giant disappointment,” Ms. Koenig said in an interview. “I’ll present what my reporting bears out, and that’s my responsibility. It’s not my responsibility to entertain you with some wonderful, perfect ending. I don’t mean that in a holier-than-thou way at all—it’s just—I’m a reporter.”

Others have suggested that Ms. Koenig has a secret ending that she’s pretending she doesn’t know—an idea she rejects. She has already completed most of her reporting, though she said that since “Serial” launched, people have come forward with new information. The show introduced its first two episodes in early October. Since then, the staff has completed each episode on deadline every week, a time pressure the producers imposed so that they could move on to other assignments. The series will likely conclude in mid-December (there is no episode on Thanksgiving).

Ms. Koenig, 45, is a veteran newspaper reporter who has worked for the last decade as a staff producer at “This American Life.” The popular public-radio show featuring narrative nonfiction stories is hosted and executive produced by Ira Glass, who serves as an editorial adviser on “Serial.”

High-school students, some the same age as the victim, are eagerly waiting to see what Ms. Koenig turns up next. Michael Godsey, an English teacher who usually makes his 11th-grade students read “Hamlet” this time of year, upended his lesson plans after “Serial.” Now roughly 150 students at Morro Bay High School on the central coast of California are listening to the show in class and doing assignments about it. At Lakes Community High School in suburban Chicago, seniors are studying the show for class, too. Some got so into it, they put up a police-style board for evidence with pictures and colored yarn threaded between suspects. “They wanted to CSI track it,” said their English teacher, Emily Cody.

The show has sparked the inevitable with any viral phenomenon: theme T-shirts, memes and spoofs.

“Everyone who listens to the podcast can feel like they’re active participants in it,” said Sal Gentile, a comedy writer who cocreated an online parody of “Serial” and posted it on YouTube. In it, two guys obsess over how obsessed they are with the series, to the point where they’re asking other people named Sarah Koenig what it’s like to be named Sarah Koenig. Mr. Gentile said he made the video after he and his friends got hooked on the show: “The degree to which our conversations were all-consuming about ‘Serial’ had reached absurd proportions.”

Corrections & Amplifications

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described “This American Life” as a nonprofit. The program is a production of Chicago Public Media/WBEZ Chicago, a nonprofit entity and the public-radio station in Chicago. (Nov. 19, 2014)

In 1970, college graduates made up less than 10 percent of the population of huge swathes of the country, the map shows.

In only a few regions — the San Francisco Bay Area, parts of Colorado and Washington, D.C. — did folks who had completed four years of college approach one-third of the population.

By 1990, the picture had dramatically changed…

…and by 2012, most of the Northeastern U.S. and huge chunks of the rest of the country had more than 30 percent of their populations holding bachelor’s degrees.

The dramatic increase in educational attainment might seem like good news, but many graduates have been left in debt and without skills needed to seize good jobs — if those jobs exist in the first place.